Chaos and Art in Goethe's Novelle

HERBERT ROWLAND Chaos and Art in Goethe's Novelle ι Toward The end of Goethe's Novelle the Fürst must decide whether to have his men kill the lion that has escaped during the fire or to yield to the keepers' pleas that they be allowed to take the animal alive. WMe the Fürst weighs his decision, the boy begins to play his flute, "gleichsam zu präludieren."1 Just after the point where the Fürst decides in favor of the Wärterfamilie we read the foUowing: "Das Kind verfolgte seine Melodie, die keine war, eine Tonfolge ohne Gesetz, und vielleicht eben deswegen so herzergreifend; die Umstehenden schienen wie bezaubert ..." (507). A sequence of sounds so formless as not to warrant the designation "melody," yet for that very reason so deeply moving—I would like to suggest that in his music the boy has done ultimately what the experimental composer John Cage recommends to his colleagues in his essay "Experimental Music" of 1957, namely, that they "give up the desire to control sound, clear [their] mind[s] of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments"; for such music is "an affirmation of life.. . , a way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."2 I would also like to suggest that there is a connection between the boy's music, indeed, the notion of art in Novelle on the whole, and the concept of chance operations, that intersection of randomness and design which Cage considered his basic principle of composition and which N. Katherine Hayles, in an article published in 1994, sees as a link between the composer and contemporary science. Already in her book Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Science and Literature (1990) Hayles finds it significant that Cage was experimenting with stochastic variations in music at the same time that the meteorologist Edward Lorenz was observing the effect of small uncertainties on the non-linear equations that describe weather formations (4). The connection between Goethe and Cage, I would like to suggest, 94 Herbert Rowland finally, is much the same as that between Cage, Lorenz, and the science of chaos that he helped establish. Of course, scholarship has shown no dearth of interest in Goethe's relationship to modern science. Günther Schmid's bibliography of studies published through 1932 includes an astonishing 4,554 titles, and Frederick Amrine surmises that a similar number appeared between that time and the compilation of his own bibliography, which came out in 1987.3 Debate over the nature and extent of the relationship continues.4 Nonetheless, there is growing evidence that Goethe, among other things, anticipated many of the most important tenets of contemporary philosophy of science , such as the impossibility of a rational reconstruction of science à la Heisenberg and the theory-ladenness of perception, i.e., the notion that there can be no neutral observation in science.5 Amrine goes so far as to suggest that Goethe offers solutions to the central dilemmas of modern philosophy of science, for example, achieving true scientific progress not by accumulating more data or reducing one theory to another, but by developing new, rigorous and controlled ways of seeing (n. 5,193). Despite the attention devoted to Goethe's science in general it has only recently come to light that he exerted a seminal influence on leading figures in chaos theory in particular, which its most enthusiastic advocates consider to be as revolutionary as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics (n. 5, 208; Gleick, 5-6). In his Chaos: Making a New Science of 1987, for example, James Gleick relates that Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was taken by the Farbenlehre and was convinced that Goethe's notion of color had been right (164-66).' Albert Libchaber, another physicist working at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, was reportedly fixated on Goethe, especially on his Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen. Gleick...